More on ‘the look’
The Look and its Conflicts
At the center of his ontological treatise, Being and Nothingness,1 in a section called “The Look,” Sartre creates a small narrative moment of dubious virtue from which he is able to resolve one of the truly vexing problems of phenomenology up to that time. That is the problem of the other; how is it that one can apprehend the other as subject? Previously, philosophy had sought to understand the other through reflection or attribution (and Sartre deals in particular with the Hegelian and Heideggerian accounts). But to regard the other as a reflection of oneself ends in an obvious solipsism; all others would be only reflections of oneself.2 To simply define the other as a subject because one saw a person standing there reduces subjectivity irretrievably to object status. And to attribute subjectivity to the other as an extension of experience with oneself as a subject renders one a source of mere doctrine through which to see others. Yet, to proclaim the other to be unknowable as a subject leaves no basis upon which to speak about personal and social relations.
In the context of 20th century EuroAmerican society, characterized by alienation and a closing down of public or political space, each of these possibilities (reflection and attribution) become egregious in providing a mechanical solution to the question – a collaboration with that sense of alienation. Hence, the importance of Sartre’s argument. A coherent response to the question of the other as subject that avoids the classical traps renews the necessary sense that in others there is someone there, and that one has the possibility of real interaction.
Sartre’s account of the look, of one’s visibility to another, reverses the terms of the problem. For Sartre, the Other-as-subject is not a subject known through oneself, but as a disruption of oneself. One confronts the other in a space that is both one’s own, and not of one’s choosing; and in that space, one apprehends the other as subject in one’s becoming an object for that other, i.e. through the other’s effect on oneself (BN,259). It is this sense of becoming an object for another that decenters the egocentric emphasis of traditional western phenomenology, and opens an exterior space between persons, where dialogue becomes possible.
A sense of what dialogue is has become an important question, in the US especially. Priding itself on maintaining the 18th century notion of “freedom of speech,” which resides at the heart of the concept of civil liberties, and thus of the modern nation, the “US ethos” has lost sight of the fact that “freedom of speech” is a monologic concept. It does not provide for social interaction, nor for the existence of a political space of cooperative participation through speech. It simply says that one may say what one likes (with certain exceptions). In an era in which the means of dissemination of speech and information are themselves monopolized by corporate structures and commercial interests, the guarantee of a qfreedom of speech does not extend to a guarantee of channels of mind that matter. Indeed, the corporativization of the media has in effect rendered the freedom of speech an empty right – that is, an empty rite that may seek solidarity, but only within the sound of one’s voice.
It would serve us well, in that case, to revisit and examine Sartre’s ontology of the look, and in particular, his extension of it to what he calls Being-for-others, in order to approach an ontology of dialogue, and the ethics contained in it, on Sartre’s account, as relevant to our relation to public space, and thus to political life. If, as Wilfred Desan has said, Sartre’s philosophy represents “the most extreme form of freedom the history of philosophy has ever presented,” (TF,160) then it behooves us to see if it will provide a mode of freedom beyond that of ritualistic “freedom of speech.”
Yet Sartre’s account contains an obvious problem, which has already served to obstruct just such a project. If one apprehends the other as a subject through having been rendered an object for the other in the look, when one reciprocates, retrieving one’s own subjecthood by returning the look, one thereby renders the other an object for oneself in turn. And the ensuing oscillation of successive objectivizations signifies an unending conflict as the originary nature of this process of interaction. An uneasy balance of subjectivities can be achieved as a contingent mutuality; but it is an unstable structure, continually on the verge of breakdown. Each individual lives in peril of the other’s re-objectivizing look; both stand ready with a pre-emptive look in order to preserve their own autonomy, subjectivity, and freedom – a kind of ontological Cold War. This contingent mutuality is what Sartre calls one’s being-for-others.
As a pragmatic intersubjectivity (or what Levinas would call an example of “philosophy’s ontic style”), being-for-others “appears as a pure irreducible contingency;” one makes the other be, and at the same time apprehends the other in situation as who one has to not be (BN,296). But in that sense, Being-for-others cannot be an intersubjectivity, since each subjectivity exists only through the cancallation of the other. To reveal oneself as a subject implies reducing the other to an object in order to do so. For the other to be a subject to whom to revea l oneself, one must submit oneself to becoming an object in turn. As a project toward ontological intersubjectivity, being-for-others is self-defeating. Being-for-others “represents the negation of any synthetic totality,” a seemingly irresolvable arena of disunion between individuals (BN,300). As Sartre puts it, “conflict is [its] original meaning” (BN,364).
For an array of commentators, the irreconcilability of this conflict, inplicit as it is in the absoluteness of Sartrean freedom, presents a political problem. It appears to render social solidarity or collective responsibility all but impossible.3 Wilfred Desan, for instance, argues that because Sartrean freedom is absolute, one is confronted with an essence of human reality that is not preceded by its existence. In Sartre’s discourse, this would amount to defining what he is suggesting is undefinable in the absoluteness of its freedom. (TF,162) If freedom has no essence, as Sartre desires, and has no bounds, then nothing is definable. (TF,168) Not only does consciousness take on the limits of definition, but it is a source of ultimate separation from all others, in the sense that there is no necessity for connection across the disparity between separate freedoms.
Thomas Flynn notes correctly that what Sartre calls the “we-subject,” the sense of acting together with someone else in a common project, remains in the realm of the psychological. Because the look cannot be plural, “relations of solidarity or equivalence are simply a translation into the plural of quite individualistic phenomena” (SME,26). And he points out that ultimately subjective or psychological relations are not social at all (SME,25). And Ronald Aronson argues that if no ontological foundation is provided for superseding the adversarial essence of one’s being-for-others, then each person remains the “relentless enemy of each and every other” (PW,133). “A society of free men treating all other free men as free is thus impossible” (PW,132). In effect, Sartre’s notion of freedom works against itself; in its absoluteness, it becomes “so sweeping as to be meaningless.” 4
Sartre argues, of course, that the “us-object” (possible even for a large group, such as an exploited class), can establish itself as a collective consciousness, but only contingently, only in the continued presence of an enemy (BN,512ff). In The Critique of Dialectical Reason, however, where Sartre describes a collective subject, it is still situationally produced in response to an external threat.5 That is, even the collective subject, the group-in-fusion, marks the eviction of solidarity from the realm of the communal, where Aronson wants to locate it, to the realm of the confrontational. In his article, “Materialism and Revolution”, Sartre allows the possibility of a solidarity based on the “recognition of other freedoms” and the demand for reciprocated "recognition on their part."6 Aronson adds, however, that Sartre’s sense of solidarity still contains a disguised adversarial bargain; if one asks, ‘solidarity in the face of what?’, an enemy seems again implied (PW,138). Aronson seeks the ontologically collective, and he concludes that Sartre’s ontology of individual freedom does not provide for a subjectivity that could support true solidarity for its own sake, as a humanization of society (PW,270).cut/
Signs along the way here:
Ricky Martin made up to look like those here , a beauty parlor named ‘Medusa’ to attract attention so they may avoid being looked at.